Share via

Little blue boxes or squares

Anonymous
2020-07-09T20:53:36+00:00

I get these little blue boxes or solid squares in front of text in my cells. The appear in front of every line or paragraph. I find them very distracting, especially when I am also using bullets. They do not go away when I turn off "show paragraphs."

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

Answer accepted by question author

  1. Anonymous
    2020-07-10T15:21:39+00:00

    Hi John,

    Thank you for your time and patience on trying to solve my problem. The problem has nothing to do with Word. The file I was working with has converted text from a PDF and these boxes came from unconverted bullets. I apologize for wasting your time. I contacted my client on how the supplied Word file imbedded these blue bullets. I was able to get the original PDF and edit it before converting to a Word file myself and gave it back to my client. It seems the cells were originally created in InDesign and then made into a PDF then converted to a Word file.

    Akira

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments

7 additional answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. John Korchok 232.1K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2020-07-10T00:47:33+00:00

    If these appear throughout your document and in every document, one or more these attributes is possibly set in the Normal style of your Normal.dotm file. Please right-click on Normal in the Style Gallery and choose Modify. Select the Line and Page Break tab. Uncheck all three attributes, then click on the Set as Default button at the bottom of the dialog. Any improvement?

    Was this answer helpful?

    2 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. John Korchok 232.1K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2020-07-09T23:42:12+00:00

    Your version of Word is out of date. The last version of Office 2011 is 14.7.7. Here's where you can download the final updater: Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.7.7 Update

    The blue squares indicate that the text to the right uses paragraph formatting that is any of Keep with next, Keep lines together and/or Page break before. (all found on the Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog).

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2020-07-09T22:42:30+00:00

    My version of Word is 14.7.3 and I am attaching a screen grab of the problem.

    As you see they look like bullets.

    Thank you

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. Bob Jones AKA CyberTaz MVP 435.5K Reputation points
    2020-07-09T21:46:32+00:00

    Can you provide a screen shot that shows these marks? Or better, save a shared copy on a cloud such as OneDrive & provide a link in your reply. I am not aware of anything in Word that creates such marks other than those which are hidden when ¶ is toggled off.

    Also, please go to Word> About Word in the main menu to confirm that your Version is 14.7.7 (which was the final update for Office 2011).

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments